Impact Calculator

In contrast to the previous pilot projects discussed, the Oxford project produced an immediate return on investment from Year 1 (£604.28) and predicted increased year-on-year savings resulting in a cumulative monetary impact of £8,817.95 by Year 5. This instant ROI reflects the fact that the Oxford retention and appraisal project required no investment in IT and systems, or initial heavy investment in additional staff resources to achieve. The project team chose to take a gradual 'from this point on' approach to appraisal and retention management with no initial surge to try to tackle the backlog. Such an approach may lack the immediate impact and 'big bang' which it is often tempting to strive for, but it is interesting to compare the experience and data from Oxford, with that of Cardiff University (below), which did seek to tackle legacy issues as part of an expensive retrospective appraisal initiative.

It is also worth bearing in mind that, as with the University of Huddersfield, Oxford chose to take a conservative approach to selecting which benefits they felt able to include within their savings. Oxford chosenot to calculate saved staff time as a monetary benefit, on the basis that it may be staff from varying (and unpredictable) grades who request files and that any attempts to construct an average grade for the purposes of calculation might be similarly misleading from an evidential perspective. Given that the change introduced was predicted to save 72 hours per annum of staff time currently taken up by retrieving files from external storage the project team denied themselves a significant additional monetary saving which might otherwise have been directly attributed to this project.

Download pilot results: University of Oxford Spreadsheet